Nachokoolaid wrote:I'll be honest (where's that losing your geek cred thread?) and admit that my knowledge of the Call of Cthulhu consists of jamming out to the Metallica song of the same name, and that's about it.

Well, here ya go, a LINK to the entire text of the story. Understand that it is not a linear plot. The opening line pretty much sums up Lovecraft's major theme.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far"

Quite a cool little chat about his thoughts on the author. I found this to wash out of my brain the awful awful trailer for the cthulu movie trailer which is getting a theatrical release in august. Do not seek it, it is beyond awful. Although Tori Spelling looks worse in it than anything HP could have dreamt up himself.

Kutulhu wrote:Since we are speaking of Lovecraft, I really wish Guillermo del Toro would use the internet freakout about 01-18-08 to his advantage and get funding for his At The Mountains of Madness script.

"Look, they WANT a movie about Cthulhu" (although Cthulhu isnt central, it is mentioned)

You know at first I used to be enthused with the prospect but after seeing two films of what he has done with Hellboy as an adaptaion I would rather never see At The Mountains of Madness on screen than see a GDT version.

Yeah, when somethings called an unimaginable, or indescribable horror, its probably best left to the printed page rather than some cgi monstrosity that looks cool first time you see it. Filling in the blanks in your subconcious I think is the better option here, personally.

Chairman Kaga wrote:I just threw up in my mouth a little. After finally reading the original story I can't stand to even think about Gordon's piece of tripe ever again.

Really? Thats actually one of my least favorite Lovecraft stories. Its too damn repetitive. I love the content, but i got a bit bored by the structure of it.

I agree with that but of course reading it collected together makes it appear more awkward. All of the repetition was necessary to remind the monthly reader of Home Brew what was going on from installment to installment of the story. If he wrote it as a short story rather than a serial I don't think he would have done all those "I knew Herbert West from back in medical school...." bits.

Chairman Kaga wrote:I just threw up in my mouth a little. After finally reading the original story I can't stand to even think about Gordon's piece of tripe ever again.

Really? Thats actually one of my least favorite Lovecraft stories. Its too damn repetitive. I love the content, but i got a bit bored by the structure of it.

I agree with that but of course reading it collected together makes it appear more awkward. All of the repetition was necessary to remind the monthly reader of Home Brew what was going on from installment to installment of the story. If he wrote it as a short story rather than a serial I don't think he would have done all those "I knew Herbert West from back in medical school...." bits.

Ohh I totally realize it was the nature of how the story was presented but it definitely hindered my enjoyment when reading it straight through.

The most used pronunciation, mostly endorsed by Chaosium games, is Ka-Thool-hoo or simply dropping the last H sound Ka-Thoo-Loo though Lovecraft never described it that way.

Wikipedia wrote:Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as "Khlûl'-hloo" (IPA: /ˈkɬʊl.ɬuː/ ?).[2] S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave several differing pronunciations on different occasions.[3] According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.[4] Long after Lovecraft's death, the pronunciation kə-THOO-loo (IPA: /kəˈθuːluː/) became common, and the game Call of Cthulhu endorsed it.

S.T. Joshi is essentially the foremost Lovecraft historian if anyone is curious. His annotated collections of Lovecraft's stories offer some fascinating information on the author.

Nachokoolaid wrote:I'll be honest (where's that losing your geek cred thread?) and admit that my knowledge of the Call of Cthulhu consists of jamming out to the Metallica song of the same name, and that's about it.

Well, here ya go, a LINK to the entire text of the story. Understand that it is not a linear plot. The opening line pretty much sums up Lovecraft's major theme.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far"

I found a big batch of H.P. Lovecraft stories to download to my new Kindle, so I've finally starting reading some Lovecraft. It turns out he's all adjectives. He thinks he can make ordinary things horrifying if he keeps telling you they're horrifying. This is how Lovecraft would caption a standard beach resort postcard:

"The hideous beachball bounced grotesquely across the ancient nameless sand towards the horrid children who were playing sickeningly with their repulsive pails and loathsome shovels ..."

It would be fun to do a global search and replace of "Cthulhu" with "Fred G. Soames" and "R'Lyeh" with "Akron, Ohio". And replace those ugly statues of Cthulhu with posters of Justin Bieber.

minstrel wrote:I found a big batch of H.P. Lovecraft stories to download to my new Kindle, so I've finally starting reading some Lovecraft. It turns out he's all adjectives. He thinks he can make ordinary things horrifying if he keeps telling you they're horrifying. This is how Lovecraft would caption a standard beach resort postcard:

"The hideous beachball bounced grotesquely across the ancient nameless sand towards the horrid children who were playing sickeningly with their repulsive pails and loathsome shovels ..."

Anna Gregson wrote:This week sees the release of THE COLDEST WAR (UK | ANZ) , the second novel in Ian Tregillis’s landmark series, the Milkweed Triptych. The trilogy began with BITTER SEEDS (UK | ANZ) and concludes with the forthcoming NECESSARY EVIL (UK | ANZ).

These novels feature a secret history of Twentieth Century conflicts in which scientifically-enhanced superhumans and dark magic collide. The result is described by Fantasy Faction as ‘oh-so compelling, fascinating and frighteningly convincing’ and by Cory Doctorow as, ‘some of the best – and most exciting – alternate history I’ve read. Bravo.’

Ian:One of the things I enjoy most about the Laundry books is the way they juxtapose spy drama, Lovecraftian horror, and the banality of office politics. They combine the profound and the mundane to great effect. Does it work because the narrowness of the corporate mindset can be laughable, or because matrix management is merely a different kind of unspeakable horror?

Charlie: I’m not certain. However, I will note that both horror and humour are tints that we can apply to a narrative; the same plot structure and characters could in principle be written into a horror story or a farce, purely depending on how we colour the narrative.

Ian: Fiction writers aren’t alone in thinking the occult makes an attractive dance partner for intelligence services. The CIA infamously speBitter Seeds - the first novel in the Milweed Triptych, a fantasy series featuring superhumand and dark magic, and earning comparisons with Charles Stross's Laundry Files novelsnt millions of dollars on its remote-viewing program, Project Stargate. It has also been alleged the Soviet navy attempted to investigate telepathy as a means of secure communications with submarines.

But the Laundry contends with extraordinarily dangerous powers, as do the intelligence operatives of the Milkweed books. How much stock would you put in the notion that a real-world three-letter agency *wouldn’t* jump at the chance to commune with ravenous extra-dimensional beings?

Charlie:None whatsoever! Which is why at least one of the Laundry’s foreign counterparts, the Black Chamber, is pretty clearly run by the many-angled ones, and the Laundry itself is full of archives documenting highly questionable compromises. In fact, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” could well serve as the overarching theme of the Laundry Files as a series (I have a long-term plot that is slowly unrolling) . . .

Back in 1997 when I began to explore this area, I started with a novelette titled “A Colder War”, which made it pretty explicit. ACW was set in the future of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” – a future in which Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the USA had all found their uses for the ancient alien technologies found by the Pabodie expedition to Antarctica. It all ends in tears (and a fate worse than global thermonuclear annihilation – the point of that story was to inject some horror back into Lovecraftiana by linking it implicitly to something truly horrifying, to anyone who grew up during the Cold War), but not before a Senator in a congressional hearing gets to utter the words, “Mister President, we cannot allow a Shoggoth Gap to emerge.”

Yes, if they got their hands on this stuff they’d use it. We have met the enemy, and we are doing our best to turn into them before they turn into us.